Law Apps Winners Announced

The apps coming out of the Law Apps course at the University of Melbourne Law School have reached such a high level of technical sophistication and usefulness that it probably surpasses what most people would have imagined possible at the time of establishing the course in 2015.

Part of this progress must be due to the fact that this is part of a JD course benefiting from participants with life and work experience. Technology has also become more powerful since 2015 with developments in mobile, cloud and programming tools.

Ultimately, it is the participants who deserve the credit for designing and building solutions to real problems. Providing technical and other assistance was Herbert Smith Freehills and Neota Logic.

The Law Apps Awards Night was held on 18 October 2018. The Joint Winners were: Prisoners Legal Service – The Bail Helper and Visa Cancellations Working Group – Visa Cancellation Appeal and Review Guide.

The apps from the two winning teams had in common that the final product of their apps was a completed document or set of documents that could be submitted in a bail application or a Visa cancellation review.

In the case of the Bail Helper app, it turned a lengthy and forbidding paper-based application form into a step-by-step Q&A-type process, also ensuring that the language was as simple as possible and legal terminology explained.

The Visa review app had an emphasis on decision-tree logic to guide the user to their grounds for a review. The teamed showed the complex programming that was behind the due date calculation (see below).